Summary

counselor collaborate with the classroom teacher to deliver some of the lessons or to teach some of the skills in a separate homeroom or advisory class, it works best if the self-regulatory learning strategies are practiced every day in all academic classes. The skills in this book are correlated to different grade levels and include modifications based on age and ability level. Districts can decide the skills that will be covered at each grade level. At the school level, teachers in a particular grade can choose a common strategy to work on. Students learn and practice that strategy in each class for a designated period of time and then they keep that strategy in a portfolio to revisit or choose to use later if needed. Strategies are revisited at subsequent grade levels with increased rigor and independence. You may be concerned that there is not enough time in the day to implement these strategies, which is a reasonable worry. However, teaching students self-regulatory learning skills may actually save time in the long run as students become more independent, efficient, motivated, and able to manage their behavior and assignments on their own.

If teachers begin in kindergarten by modeling self-regulated learning and continue to work on these skills each year, they won’t have to constantly go into academic triage mode as large problems arise. Although students younger than seven years old will not have the necessary abilities for independent self-regulated learning yet (Rutherford, Buschkuehl, Jaeggi, & Farkas, 2018), teachers can expose them to developmentally appropriate strategies through modeling and teacher-guided activities. For this reason, you will find many of the activities in this book for kindergarten through second-grade students are teacher led.

Teachers can provide students with tools to help them learn how to sort through and organize the vast array of new information they are exposed to each day. This book will help teachers change the way students experience learning—even subjects that they don’t enjoy—by modifying their approach and helping students to alter theirs. To succeed when presented with challenging academic tasks, students need to become active seekers and processors of information and ideas instead of passive recipients. They need to practice critical-thinking skills (Cook & Klipfel, 2015) and metacognitive strategies many times by using them during active learning tasks. This presents teachers with what feels like an impossible and overwhelming mission: getting students, including some who struggle with basic fact recall, to understand and engage in higher-level-thinking skills. This book will show teachers how to set up students for success by presenting challenging coursework while helping students develop the skills of self-regulated learners. I will also address how school administrators can support teachers and students in this mission. In the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and developing technological advances to learning, when new and difficult tasks permanently fell to teachers without many new resources to supplement the workload growth, burnout increased exponentially (Weißenfels, Klopp, & Perels, 2022). It will only continue to grow if left unaddressed. Stress continues to be the number-one reason teachers leave the teaching profession before retirement age (Diliberti, Schwartz, & Grant, 2021). Further, the decline in childhood mental health has become a U.S. emergency (Vestal, 2021). For these reasons, it is more important than ever that teachers feel supported by their school and district-level administrators to empower students with the skills and supports that make learning possible, meaningful, and relevant.

The Road Map to Expertise

Teachers receive frequent professional development on creating engaging lessons but don’t receive much training on how to provide students with the strategies they need to benefit from these lessons or continue to learn once the teacher is not right beside them. At this time, doubling down on drilling students with facts and information without providing a way to organize and manage this information would be a mistake. Instead, aim to create a community where students partner with teachers in their learning. By doing this, students gain leadership and purpose, and teachers get to gradually take a step back. Educators know what students need to learn, but they also must give students a map that allows them to navigate the challenging road ahead. This book provides that map of strategies you can use to help guide your students in becoming self-regulated learners.

In author and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell’s (2011) book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he describes, among other things, the positive effects of many hours of practice. His 10,000-hour rule, which refers to the time it takes to become an expert at a task or concept, is loosely based on the previous research of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. This research, summarized in a recent study by Kiruthiga Nandagopal and K. Anders Ericsson (2012), poses a question that should concern all teachers: How do you capture superior performance and reproduce it?

Ericsson’s research differs from Gladwell’s (2011) popular book in its emphasis on deliberate practice or practice oriented toward a specific goal (Ericcson, 2014; Nandagopal & Ericcson, 2012). Ericsson argues that it takes hours of deliberate practice “designed to improve specific aspects of performance through self-evaluation and gradual refinement of performance with feedback” to develop proficient skills (Nandagopal & Ericsson, 2012, p. 2). In other words, simply spending 10,000 hours will not make you an expert. Many students spend 10,000 hours in school and do not graduate as expert learners. There is no magic number of hours that makes practice result in gains. Instead, a student has to work smarter by analyzing and evaluating their current performance in order to practice in a way that continuously refines and improves their process and resulting skill level.

Through practice, students can build strategies that allow them to plan, monitor, and evaluate their performance. Those who continue to be high achievers as adult learners display more self-regulatory behaviors and appropriately timed strategy use than nonexperts (Nandagopal & Ericsson, 2012). It should be every educator’s goal to teach students through modeling, strategies, reflection, and revision how to become experts and proficient learners. If you introduce the idea of self-regulated learning at the beginning of a student’s schooling and stay with them until they’re developmentally ready around the third grade, you’ll have exactly ten years (or, approximately 10,000 hours) to create expert learners.

Let’s begin.